Posts Tagged ‘human nature’
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Obesity is unnatural, but it’s natural to try for it.
This morning I sat on a panel for medical students; the subject was obesity. Nationally, as anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock knows, the picture is not pretty-in fact it’s pretty ugly. By the standard definition, obesity means a Body Mass Index (BMI; weight in kilos over height in meters squared) above 30, and in about 15 years starting in 1990 we went from 22 percent to 33 percent obese.
Now, I don’t care what you call it or (more…)
Tags: Add new tag, BMI, diabetes, diet, disease, epidemic, evolutionary psychology, health, health habits, human nature, hunter gatherers
Posted in My Blog | 1 Comment »
Saturday, August 14th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Statesmen understand human nature. Why not psychologists and social scientists?
Most psychologists don’t like human nature, or at least not the idea of it. Clinicians, life coaches, and corporate motivators dislike it because it implies unchangeability. Anyone who took college psychology knows how to modify behavior, from direct instruction to manipulative advertising.
And then, what fool surveying the huge variety of human personalities, needs, and tastes would dream of trying to characterize all that as one thing? Well, some fool might, but not the philosophers, evolutionists, historians and political leaders who have long used the phrase. They’ve always meant something complex, varied, and big-but not limitless.
Barack Obama, for instance. (more…)
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Darwin, evolutionary psychology, George Washington, human nature, Obama, Politics, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, war, Winston Churchill
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Monday, May 31st, 2010 by Mel Konner
Genius may be 90 percent perspiration, but it helps to have the right starting point.
A comment by Jack Davis on my last blog entry leads me to write something about talent, genes, environment, and how we succeed. Jack asks about a new book by David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong. (more…)
Tags: behavioral genetics, genes, genetics, genius, human nature, nature vs. nurture, talent
Posted in My Blog | 11 Comments »
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Is Barack Obama an evolutionary psychologist?
Since I criticized President Obama’s speech last year in Cairo (and even “rewrote” it) and later pointed out the names and deeds of those who did not get the Nobel Peace Prize because he did, I think it’s only fair that I resume this blog after a long hiatus by writing about his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in December.
I have to say that it stunned me. (more…)
Tags: Darwinian views of violence, evolutionary psychology, human nature, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Obama, Oslo, peace, sociobiology, violence, war
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Sunday, November 15th, 2009 by Mel Konner
A couple of weeks ago I posted some musings about “the self” in anticipation of being on a panel with Steven Pinker (author of The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought) and Noga Arikha (author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours) at Tufts University. The panel, convened by Jonathan Wilson, was titled “The New Biology and the Self,” and what follows was my contribution. The graduate student referred to is Monica Chau of Emory University.
I told a very smart neurobiology graduate student named Monica yesterday that I’d been asked to speak on “The New Biology and the Self.” She said, “What’s the new biology?” I said, “I don’t know, but that’s the least of my problems. What’s the self?” (more…)
Tags: bioethics, brain, brain imaging, enhancement drugs, evolution, evolutionary psychology, genes, genomics, human nature, philosophy, sociobiology, the self
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Sunday, November 8th, 2009 by Mel Konner
Thank goodness for a brave woman with character to spare
Five feet and four inches of pure skill and courage, Kimberly Denise Munley, at lunchtime Thursday, saved an unknown but large number of people from injury and death. She did it by running straight toward a terrorist armed with two guns blazing at her and she kept walking into that deadly barrage until both of them fell with serious wounds. Around them were the bodies of the twelve people the terrorist had murdered and at least thirty he had injured—one, it turned out, also fatally. (more…)
Tags: Fort Hood, gender, heroes, heroism, human nature, Kimberly Munley, terrorism, violence, women's roles
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Monday, November 2nd, 2009 by Mel Konner
And assuming we can answer that, how is science changing it?
Big philosophical concepts bother me, but I am expected later this week at Tufts University, where I’ll be on a panel discussing “The New Biology and the Self.” So I need to get over my reluctance to talk about the self. And it’s not the only big idea that gives me trouble.
Consciousness and free will are two other notions (more…)
Tags: brain imaging, consciousness, enhancement drugs, free will, genes, human nature, personal genomics, philosophy, the self
Posted in My Blog | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 by Mel Konner
Prof. Mari Fitzduff, who I’m honored to call a friend, set me thinking the other day when she commented on a proposed speech I wrote for President Obama to substitute for the one he gave in Cairo. But before I share our exchange, you need to know that Mari is the director of the Conflict and Coexistence Program at Brandeis University, where she moved after many years as director of INCORE, the International Conflict Research Institute in (as she always says it to avoid taking sides) “Derry/Londonderry,” Northern Ireland. In that role she played an important part in the years and years of mediation that finally brought a blessed end to that terrible conflict. (more…)
Tags: conflict resolution, ethnic conflict, human nature, Mari Fitzduff, one world, Politics, violence, war
Posted in My Blog | 2 Comments »
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 by Mel Konner
Sex is something that women have and men want. Or is it?
I caused a bit of comment in a blog on another website when I wrote, “Your mother told you men only want one thing, and you may have rolled your eyes, but she had a piece of the truth. Biology and common sense both tell us sex is something women have and men want. We can try as hard as we want to talk our way around this, but we can’t make it any less true…”
(more…)
Tags: evolutionary psychology, gender, gender gap, human nature, marriage, sex, sexual desire, sexual differences, sexual drive, sociobiology
Posted in My Blog | 5 Comments »
Sunday, March 1st, 2009 by Mel Konner
Can we say anything about human beings to come? In a word, yes.
Recently after lecturing about human evolution, I had a student come up to me and ask—she apologized first, as some do, despite my mantra that there are no bad questions—if I had any thoughts about future evolution. I did, although I hesitated to offer them; the political correctness monitors are everywhere in universities today. But, casting caution to the winds,
(more…)
Tags: behavior genetics, cultural evolution, evolution, evolutionary psychology, faith, future evolution, human nature, natural selection, population growth, religion, reproductive success, twin studies
Posted in My Blog | 6 Comments »
human nature 
